Camberwell Village Hall update

Dear all,

This is a quick new post. Basically, we have had a fantastic response so far and we have had about 600 people sign a petition to object to the change of use of the Bingo Hall to a church within a week. Most of these people come from Camberwell and most people are upset that there has been little or no consultation with people from Camberwell, and also that there is are no guarantees that the building will be available in any meaningful way for the community. There is a lot of rhetoric in the planning application about serving the community but it doesn’t amount to a “hill of beans” as some wise chap once said (Humphrey Bogart I think). In other words, it’s hot air and there are no guarantees that they will help or facilitate access for community activities.

On top of this the plans allow for a seating arrangement for 1500 people, with around 450 cars being used, if the place is at capacity, to bring them here. This most certainly is against planning regulations.

Add to this the loss to the local economy since there are no guarantees that the money generated by the church will stay here, and the fact that a lot of the potential congregation will not be local and you start to see that there is no way that this planning application should be allowed.

The Camberwell Village Hall Campaign has written its objections which you can see here. There are three parts, with parts one and two below. They are long, but there is much to object to!

http://bit.ly/objectionletterpart1

http://bit.ly/objectionletterpart2

So what can you do?

In theory, the consultation period has ended, but according to the head of planning at Southwark and the planning officer, it is still possible to send your representations to them. Here is a link to the Camberwell Village Hall campaign. In it you will find all the documents and information you need to make more objections to the change of use and letters you can send to planning. The quicker you do it the better and the more of you who do so the better too.

http://bit.ly/CVHletter2

There is also a petition you can sign which is at

http//:bit.ly/camberwellvillagehallpetition

Thank you everyone who has helped so far. I think we have a very strong case and hopefully soon we will have a building that the whole community can use.

128 thoughts on “Camberwell Village Hall update”

  1. I worship only the Tennents Super. I see they’re making it more expensive in Scotland.

    You seen that bearded dude always sat at the bus stop near former Rhino Sports / DRINK STORE? He’s a modern day apostle.

    I’ve been watching him. He used to dabble in cider but every time I see him these days he’s only on the Super.

    He’s found the purest path and he’s heading towards the light.

  2. Fish n chips from Flying Fish has gone up to a hefty £6.50 now. The fish was not up to par.

    A sandwich that cost me £3.50 two weeks ago now costs £3.80. Wheat prices rising.

    Food riots in Africa, says the FT today.

    Won’t be long til we’re all fighting in the streets over a can of Whiskas.

  3. not convinced about the need for a holland and barrett as we’ve got a perfectly functioning local health food store already in ‘basic’ — next door to sugamoma on denmark hill. it does make me wonder if anyone’s at all bothering to do any research at all at all these days before buying expensive buildings/setting up businesses. or maybe it’s that camberwell’s seen as a wild west territory where anything goes as long as you has money?
    perplexed smiley

  4. Yeah, I did wonder about that place too. H+B do more stuff though. I don’t think they’re bothered about our local place. Plus there’ll be all the muscle kids to get their whey protein.

  5. Reckon the NOTW will go after Hague again on Sunday?

    Someone needs to unpick his claim that he can’t be gay if his wife had a miscarriage..

  6. There’s only one health food shop for me…

    Baldwins on Walworth Road

    As well as knowing their stuff…anybody who goes to the time,trouble and effort to produce such a fantstic retro shopfront and raise the standard is more than O.K by me and deserves my cash 🙂

    Holland & Barrett + Shareholders = Extremely Wide Berth…

  7. Agree, Euseb. Just walking into Baldwins makes you feel better. Their sage tea is a very wise buy for DIY rehab.

    Who is Murdoch’s real target? Hague or Coulson? Nasty business, weird stuff, funny people.

  8. Hopefully H&B won’t impact too much on Basic’s business; otherwise, I think it’s a very positive thing that chains are investing in Camberwell… as long as we keep a nice mix of independents. Speaking of which, I was in Sugarmomma the other day buying earrings — their stock of quality, unusual and cool women’s clothes, accessories and the like rivals any chains, and the owner is lovely. And I like being able to buy Vivienne Westwood shoes on Denmark Hill. Odie and Amanda near the station — also fantastic, and my main source of necklace-based gifts. Sugarmomma sources quirky and cool stuff, and O&A design and make it themselves. Peacocks, H&B… I wonder what the next chain will be to cross the SE5 border. Come on, Foyles!

  9. I like Basic because they sell refills for Ecover detergents, which means I don’t have to keep buying new plastic bottles. I don’t like the free walk-in Tarot readings they have; I don’t know why healthy / ecological living has to be associated with mumbo jumbo.

  10. In the interest of supporting independent business I tried the butcher in Camberwell out the other day and when I asked what type of steak they had was promptly told Beef. When I asked what type of beef steak the man behind the counter very nastily started saying “cow love, you know cow MOO MOO Cow!”

    Now maybe I shouldn’t have assumed they had a wide variety of steak but I certainly didn’t expect to get Moo’d at in such a derogatory way. I promptly removed myself and my children from the shop and will never go back again.

  11. Heave a sigh of relief that, when you run out of it, you can still get tincture of mhyrr at Baldwin’s. And Sarsaparilla when you need it. And other stuff too esoteric to even mention.

    Anyone know what tincture of myhrr is good for?

    Christine’s Meat and Fish, I cannot help it, makes me SHUDDER if I look at the display for more than a moment. Same as Noodels City buffet. Christine’s has another shop at the udder end of Coldharbour Lane in what was the pub that was Living Room. I feel a bit sick even typing it. Still I’d be surprised if someone in that shop said Moo to a goose.

    Whoever the Moo butcher is should be reported to someone — like to us on this blog — so we can boycott them and feel self satisfied by not going there.

    There is still time to get your objections in about God at Gala.

    Send an email to:

    ATTN: Susannah Pettit — Planning Applications 10/AP/1875/ & 10/AP/1879

    planning.​applications@​southwark.​gov.​uk

    Just say you object most strongly to a change of use which will permanently remove a valuable amenity to the community from use by the community and that you believe it should continue to be used for entertainment for the wider population of SE5 who have virtually no amenities available to them now the bingo has gone…

    Or something like that.

    There’s a much more comprehensive and more better template here: http://bit.ly/bOlFhQ

  12. Forgive me if this has been noted before, but –

    Noodels City is now called Noodles City.

    The Vietnamese restaurant on Camberwell Church St has been renamed Van Hing, to lull us into a false sense of security.

    The cheapest Coronas in Camberwell can be bought at Camberwell Daily on Camberwell New Road. Friendly service in there also.

  13. Mark

    “tincture of myhrr”

    I believe is an early form of toothpaste which also helps reduce gingevitis…

    Very sad about Christine’s Meat and Fish…Can’t help thinking how great that place would have been if they had just kept the old Kennedy’s shopfront and fittings and given them a little TLC and lick of paint…

    Maybe the tincture of myhrr would have got those old cream and green tiles gleaming 😉

    A great shame

  14. Um, I know this is going to sound pretentious, but it’s actually “myrrh”.

    M — y — r — r — h.

    Myrrh.

    Say it again, y’all.

    Remember it for Scrabble.

  15. Tincture of OOPS! Eusoright. Plus dab it on a mouth ulcer and it’ll be gone within 24 hours.

    Magic stuff. VERY bitter.

    Incidentally, I’ve been meaning to say/propose this for ages but it keeps passing me by, was just reminded by this http://bit.ly/abKaB2 pic.

    On New Church Road, between Edmund Street and Southampton way, the mysteriously undemolished section at the back of the Elmington estate.

    Can anyone tell how this came to pass? Call me cynical but it looks to me like hard evidence an ill conceived very expensive grand plan gone horribly wrong. It couldn’t be the Council ran out of money in the middle of a dabbling in a bit of amateurish social engineering? A divisive monumental cock up to a community? Something like that? Just maybe?

    Seriously I think the remaining buildings should be listed and turned into a surreal monument to the stupidity and incompetence of our times.

    Done properly it could be a nationally sought out bit of urban culture circuit architecture/sculpture with an impact on a par with Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the inside of a House http://bit.ly/6N5Eoo in Hackney which, ironically in this context, was knocked down when it should have stayed.

    If anything the ten boxes facing toward Addington Square, which is what the flats plainly are, once given a careful tidy up treatment would look fantastic. Majestic even. And if the space around them is treated to do them justice as a monument worth visiting, will create an immediately more imposing and impressive message than Whiteread’s work. It would be all over the press and people, tv crews and so on, would come from all over the world to see it.

    Get something like that done and it might be impetus to get the rest of the area kick started.

  16. That large area of wasteground behind the somewhat penetrable boarding of Edmund Street has been an excellent location for the situationist over recent years.

    The flats and their “wasteland sports ground” have offered facilities for BMXing, distant-country-themed, dirt-pitch football, photography (a sole sunflower growing out of the rubble, hence — ) philosophy, art (the torn wallpaper of the box flats has provided subject matter for MA printmakers at the art college seeking urban detritus images) and one evening recently, a Spanish guitar, propped against a giant rubbish skip and needing major structural work.

    The guitar was made some years ago in the old East Germany from unter den Linden wood and the like and is — uncannilily and eerily — identical to that owned by Pete, the award-winning carpenter well known round these parts for his superb work, now resident in Somerset.

    http://www.whyknotwood.com

    And who better to fix the instrument than the holzernwizard himself, vastly overqualified for the task — but one would suremost want to play the same-self wooden guitar owned by the mastercarpenter, would one not, yes? Yes! A crippled instrument salvaged from the bombsite! — now doubly a bombsite!! — a wasteland first created by the Flugelwaffe in 1943 and now yet once more again the ghostly outlines of the old Victorian strasses strafed — this time by Southwark and its cheerily heavy-handed, steel-ball-wielding contractors with their flame-red hair and faces.

    So. The guitar is now fixed, fettled and finessed by the timbermaster himself and once again the lindenfowl and volkswgenvogel sing of yearning, zeppelin-bosomed maids and doomed poets, composers and philosophers eternally doomed to be doomed, but still singing about it in the hooty tenor of the tinkly, rheinmaidenhair, tingly-tangly strings of the grey-clad-comrade-built lute.

    Yet the resourceful cockney bombsite urchin has the Larstlarf!

  17. @peter: that should read ‘the absolutely brilliant’ashes to ashes”? 🙂

    @gay camberwell: disagree about chains being a good thing as they may be employing local people but that’s as far as any one can make any claims to ‘localism’. am really exhausted today so brain’s a bit muddled but ultimately, any one ‘shop’ space taken by a chain is in theory one less local shop space. or local community space. or local art/culture space. x

  18. By the way..

    Is all that Whey Protein that Holland and Barrett sell infused with powdered penal glands from racing horses that sadly needed to be shot?

    😉

  19. Hello Camberwell comrades I would like to draw you attention to a new book I have written on cycling routes in the capital called Where to Ride – London. We are having a book launch in town on Tuesday so do come along if you fancy.. please find details on the website http://www.wheretoridelondon.co.uk.. Alternatively if you just want to go right ahead and buy the thing it will soon be available at Review, Peckham – or on Amazon. Please pass on to friends and family…. — End of shallow plug — …. thanks for reading.

  20. NickW

    Looks interesating. Route 26 is a good running route too.

    Do you know incidentally whether cyclists can now use the southbank path between Tower Bridge and Blackfriars? I thought cycling had been banned by LB Southwark, but this morning the thing was awash with cyclists.

  21. Hi Florian,

    Thanks. That section of the Thames path is not a cycle route but cyclists aren’t prohibited either. Most cyclist would choose not to take it as it has so many walkers and it is slow going — its much quicker to use one road back from the river which only has v. light traffic and is designated a cycle route. I think that this morning there were probably lots more people on bikes, trying to avoid this evenings tube strike . Many of them probably don’t often cycle so don’t know to take the road behind.

  22. Talking of Blue Plaques (or was that the other thread?) Michael Faraday has a whole school named after him off Albany Road.

    I see they nearly finished the rebuild. The same architect who did Peckham Library. A worthwhile investment I’d say.

  23. That’s a great stretch of the river. Incredibly busy these days.

    Good to see how all the community activism over the years has helped the area grow without being entirely over run by the steel & glass corporate developers.

  24. There’s a public consultation underway to decide if cycling will be allowed on that part of the South Bank in future, so if you feel strongly about it you should make your views known.

    I quite like to cycle there, but it’s usually so busy that it’s rarely possible.

  25. Nick Woodford is dead right that it’s better to use the road inland on that stretch between Blackfriars and Waterloo — the walkway is too complicated and it’s not right to bother the walkers — they are people too, even if they just have legs.

    So many cyclists are airheads.

    Looks like a genuinely useful book, Nick, good choice of rides. Do you remember “Richard’s Bicycle Book”? That had in it really practical stuff but better still, the philosophy of attitude or the attitude of the freewheeling philosophy that makes cycling so liberating — horrible cliche word that, but true here.

    Trains are great.

    The trip to Sevenoaks from Denmark Hill or Peckham Rye is literally a trip — the Tolkienian hills of the North Downs, the Stepford paradise of the town, the dreaminess of Knole Park and the venereal bliss of the house where Vita and Virginia enjoyed each other. Surely this is in Gay Camberwell’s rough guide destinations?

    We are going to try St Albans and Bedford next, going the other way, northwards. Offbeat places that make Camberwell worth living in for the compare & contrast.

  26. We’ve been lobbying Southwark Council to make the temporary ping pong table on Camberwell Green (due to be removed very soon) a permanent feature, as it’s so popular with locals and a fantastic free, healthy pastime that’s inclusive and open to all. The table is usually very busy, and when we’ve played on it, we’ve instantly bonded with random locals. It looks as though we may have been successful! Currently there are TWO ping pong tables on Camberwell Green (though I suspect they plan to remove the original one at some point as it’s bound for the next ‘Ping’ event in another city I believe).

  27. Peter

    Off topic, but there is another Warwick [Gardens] Wingding coming up soon — Saturday 25 September. Bigger, better — with surprise guest(tbc), beer/comedy tent, chemical toliets etc

    You very kindly let me put a short piece up on your blog last time promoting the thing. Could we (the Friends of Warwick Gardens) do the same again? cheers.

  28. I was at the Barbican last weekend and saw a man playing ping pong against his wife/girlfriend; he was taking it very seriously, leaping and grunting and smashing shots past her. He was very comical.

  29. @everyone: wiffwaff should indeed be taken seriously.
    on an even more serious note, let’s have a tournament on the green this saturday? (it’s the only saturday i have left free) or sunday?
    2pm?
    and also where can i get the balls and pads and tings?

  30. You can imagine them playing wiff waff on the Titanic with cigar box lids and champagne cork balls.

    The ping pong tables are a government scheme for the unemployed.

  31. Mindless, hopeless. Pearse St. Right in the middle of N Peckham near Burgess Pk.

    Del Boy might have started a joky sort of bad image, but it’s really become a media shorthand for worthless ghetto hasn’t it — Peckham. But then so’s ‘South London’. The term’s a running gag and a byword for crime and danger for too many Londoners.

  32. Living in the area, I still feel that it’s pretty safe. On streets like Pearse Street there are always kids playing outside. I think it was just bad luck that the earlier motorbike accident attracted some bad’uns into what is now a fairly quiet family area.

    Perhaps I’m wrong though. If I was a black teenager I might well have a totally different perspective on the area. And perhaps I should be glad that I am rubbish at football as it’s a skill that seems to attract trouble round here.

  33. Black teenagers throughout the whole of Greater London are all at risk from black gangs. They cannot travel freely from one area to another, as though this were South Africa. Many are enslaved into things they may not ultimately want to be involved in at all. They are postcode targeted, and further targeted within the postcode, that’s how micro-tribal and parochial it is. It is as though black people are not considered to be people at all by the gangs, but something else.

    To think that what black Brits have built up since 1945 is being undermined by a bunch of jewellery-clad narcissists — and that’s just the girls — makes the blood boil.

    Brixton is horrible. Harlem was never like that.

  34. It’s quite rare that I learn something about Camberwell from my students (being that they are mostly in the UK from China for the first time, have fairly rudimentary levels of English, spend their lives up in Hendon studying at Middlesex Uni, and have barely understand the concept of the West End let alone south of the river and Camberwell, but… occasionally, you learn something new.

    For example, there used to be a Marmite factory on Camberwell Green or nearabouts.

    Cue everyone saying, yeah, knew that already!

  35. I’m pretty sure someone pointed out a building toward the Denmark Road end of Warner Road as being a Marmite factory on an old map but my memory’s rubbish.

    It would seem likely, since it’s made from what I imagine to be unspeakably vile gunk byproducts of brewing, that a Marmite production plant would be built next to a brewery, next to a railway. Was there a brewery in Warner Road?

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